SUNDAY WITH PHILOSOPHY JANE | We Spend All Summer Saying There’s Plenty of Time

By the time the Minnesota State Fair opened, I had already failed to complete most of my summer.

This surprised me because I had been very busy having plenty of time.

Back in June, summer looked enormous. It stretched out in front of me with the confidence of something that had no intention of ending. I had plans. I was going to sit outside more, take a couple of day trips, and invite people over without turning the invitation into a military operation. I was going to visit a state park I had been meaning to see for three years, and I was going to read on the patio.

I was also going to clean something in the garage, although I cannot remember what it was now, which probably explains why it remains unclean.

None of these plans concerned me because there was plenty of time. That phrase carried me comfortably through June.

Brenda suggested the park. "Definitely," I said. "We have all summer."

Someone mentioned getting together for dinner. "Absolutely. We have all summer."

I drove past the turn for the day-trip destination and thought about how nice it would be to finally go. "One of these weekends," I told myself.

This is how human beings can possess three months and somehow spend all three waiting for a better Saturday.

The Great Minnesota Warning Bell

July arrived, but I was not worried. July is still serious summer, possessing real authority. Nobody looks at July 12 and starts wondering where the year went unless that person has recently purchased school supplies.

I continued postponing things responsibly. The patio would still be there next weekend, the park had survived this long without me, and my friends were unlikely to relocate without notice.

Then August arrived, and something changed.

The first half of August still allows a person to maintain certain illusions. The days are warm, the trees are green, and the grill remains socially relevant. You can still walk through a store and see patio furniture pretending it has a future.

Then somebody says the sentence: "The State Fair starts next week."

And every Minnesotan understands what has just happened. The clock has appeared.

The Minnesota State Fair runs for twelve days and ends on Labor Day. This year, it opened August 27 and closes Monday, September 7. The Fair describes itself accordingly: "12 Days of Fun Ending Labor Day."

That sounds cheerful, but it is also a subtle warning.

In Minnesota, the State Fair does more than bring together agriculture, art, livestock, music, and enough fried food to make the human digestive system seek legal representation. It arrives at precisely the point when summer stops feeling unlimited.

The calendar says summer continues beyond Labor Day, and I understand this because I have consulted science. Autumn does not begin simply because somebody turns off the deep fryer in Falcon Heights.

But there is official summer, and then there is Minnesota summer. Minnesota summer begins when we finally trust that the snowblower may remain unemployed for a while, and it begins ending when the State Fair opens.

The Fair is our enormous annual notice that whatever we said we were going to do "this summer" had better start moving through committee.

Give me ninety days, and I behave like a billionaire. Give me four days, and suddenly every minute has been assigned a specific job.

The Fair Plan

I decided I would go to the State Fair and make a proper day of it, which was my first mistake. There is no such thing as making a proper day of the Minnesota State Fair; you enter with intentions and eventually surrender to events.

I made a list anyway. I wanted to see several exhibits, visit the livestock barns, look at the art, see some demonstrations, and walk through the Agriculture Horticulture Building. I wanted to eat a few things, but sensibly.

Nobody goes to the State Fair to eat sensibly. You can eat sensibly at home, where nobody has put cheese curds within walking distance of a milkshake.

Brenda looked at my list. "You made an itinerary?"

"It’s not an itinerary," I said.

"What is it?"

"Things I don't want to miss."

"With times beside them?"

"Approximate times."

"And arrows?"

"The arrows are for efficiency."

She handed it back. "You're going to the Fair with a flowchart."

It was not technically a flowchart because I had not finished drawing the boxes.

We arrived, entered the grounds, and immediately stopped following the plan. I saw a line, which is dangerous at the State Fair because a line creates intense curiosity.

There were at least thirty people standing there, which meant whatever was at the front had been democratically certified. We joined the line, and ten minutes later Brenda asked what we were buying.

"I’m not sure," I admitted.

"You have been standing in line for ten minutes."

"Everybody else seems confident."

Eventually we discovered it was food. Of course it was food. At the State Fair, that is a statistically responsible assumption. We bought some, it was excellent, and my itinerary was now twenty-three minutes behind.

Just One Thing to Eat

I had also established a food policy: I was not going to spend the entire day eating. This is an important policy to announce before entering a place where eating is occasionally interrupted by walking to the next thing you are going to eat.

"I’m just going to try a few things," I told Brenda.

She said nothing, which bothered me. "You don't believe me?"

"I didn't say anything," she replied.

"You made a face."

"I have known you a long time."

Old friends are dangerous because they have access to historical data.

The first food did not count because we had stumbled onto it accidentally. The second did not count because Brenda wanted to try it and I was merely participating in friendship. The third was something we had discussed before arriving, which made it part of the original budget and therefore administratively invisible.

Then we encountered something I had never seen before. "Do you want to split one?" Brenda asked.

This is how State Fair accounting works. Splitting something does not mean eating less; it means purchasing an additional food item under a cooperative agreement.

By this point, I was carrying a beverage large enough to have its own watershed, and my carefully planned route had collapsed.

The Person You Haven’t Seen Since 2019

We resumed our walk, and then I heard my name.

There are approximately two places where Minnesotans are guaranteed to encounter someone they have not seen in years: the State Fair and a place where they have gone looking terrible because they were certain they would not see anyone.

I turned around, and there stood someone I had not seen since before I had apparently begun measuring my life in presidential administrations.

We hugged, talked about families, and discussed work. We attempted to determine exactly how long it had been since we last saw each other, which is an exercise that should be avoided after age forty because every answer sounds accusatory.

"No, it couldn't have been seven years," I said.

"It was."

"Really?"

"Yes."

Nobody knew what happened. Nothing bad had happened, which was the real problem. There had simply been plenty of time. We had both been busy, and there was always another week, another month, or another occasion. Then seven years walked by wearing ordinary clothes.

We promised not to let that happen again. "We should get together soon," we said.

And then, because neither of us had learned anything during the conversation, I nearly said, "We have plenty of time."

I caught myself. "Before Christmas," I said instead. This is what maturity looks like at my age: I have reduced indefinite postponement to a four-month window.

Did You See Everything?

Hours later, my feet had begun sending formal complaints.

We had seen animals, exhibits, machinery, art, and thousands of people. We saw people looking for other people, people eating while walking, parents pretending not to hear their tired children, and couples standing over maps disagreeing about where they were while physically standing beneath signs identifying their exact location.

The Fair was operating normally.

We had also failed to see several things on my list. On the way out, somebody asked the traditional question: "Did you see everything?"

Everything? At the Minnesota State Fair?

My phone battery was at fourteen percent, my feet were communicating exclusively through pain, and I had eaten enough food to affect regional commodity prices.

"No," I said.

"Are you coming back?"

I looked at Brenda, and she smiled. "There's still time."

Labor Day Arrives

Labor Day itself carries a serious history beneath the long weekend. The holiday grew out of the late nineteenth-century labor movement as workers sought recognition for their social and economic contributions. The first Labor Day celebration was held in New York City in 1882, and Congress made the first Monday in September a federal holiday in 1894.

In Minnesota, Labor Day also brings the State Fair to its annual close. This Monday is Day 12. Fairground admission runs from 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., with the grounds closing at 8:00 p.m.

There is something wonderfully blunt about closing time. All summer, time had been negotiable: later, next weekend, one of these days. Closing time does not participate in that kind of language.

By 8:00 p.m., the Fair does not care that you meant to visit one more exhibit. September does not care that you intended to sit outside more often, and Monday does not negotiate with Tuesday because you never got around to that day trip.

Eventually, "plenty of time" becomes "not enough time," and somehow we are always shocked by the transition.

I don't think the problem is that we waste our lives; that sounds too dramatic for what usually happens. Most of the time, we are simply living them. There are groceries to buy, appointments to keep, lawns to mow, work to finish, and ordinary Tuesdays that consume twenty-four hours without asking whether those hours matched our seasonal aspirations.

Summer does not disappear because we failed to appreciate it properly. It gets used. Some of it becomes memorable, and some of it becomes errands.

There’s Still Time

By Labor Day, I had stopped thinking about everything I had failed to do and started thinking about what had actually happened.

There had been dinners I had not planned, conversations that lasted longer than expected, and ordinary evenings that became wonderful because nobody was trying particularly hard. There had been enough.

We have a strange habit of judging periods of our lives by what we planned for them instead of what actually happened inside them. A vacation becomes the attractions we reached, a weekend becomes the errands we completed, and a summer becomes the list we made in June.

Then September arrives and we start grading ourselves. Maybe that is why endings make us sentimental: the beginning gave us possibilities, but the ending gives us evidence.

The Fair would close Monday night. Soon the booths would shut down, vendors would pack up, and the animals would head home. Tuesday morning would arrive, people would return to work, traffic patterns would change, and the calendar would fill.

I had finally accepted that I was not going to finish summer. There was nothing to finish. It had happened, and that was enough.

Then, while Brenda and I were walking toward the exit, a woman walked past carrying something sweet that I had somehow managed not to eat.

I stopped talking, and Brenda saw my face. "No," she said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You're thinking it."

"I am simply observing."

"You've eaten enough."

"That is a completely separate issue."

She kept walking, but I looked at the food disappearing into the crowd, then at my watch, and finally at Brenda.

She already knew. I smiled.

"There’s still time."

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